defect tracking

Conference Presentations

Continuous integration (CI) has become a buzzword, with most engineering organizations claiming they've adopted the practice. However, the sad truth is that unreliable tests, long feedback loops, and poor configuration management block their efforts and minimize CI's potential benefits. Jesse Dowdle shares how AtTask radically redesigned its engineering pipeline and, through massive CI scaling, drove three days of testing to just minutes. Learn the pros and cons of different CI systems and how to integrate them with the cloud. Watch a live demo of AtTask's internal test and CI systems, which they’ve designed to make "Every commit a potential release candidate"-meaning that every commit is an iteration. Arm yourself with the talking points to sell massive CI to executives.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a popular model that describes the stages of human psychological development. Anu Kak shares how Maslow's work can be applied to align the quality thinking of a software development organization through a “Hierarchy of Quality.” This builds a quality-centric culture and enhances the quality of products before they are released while quickly learning from mistakes. Anu describes a path beginning at the basic needs for high quality-test plans, defects, regression tests, etc.-and progresses to define what is needed to achieve high levels of sustainable customer satisfaction. Anu describes how “self actualization” in customer quality can be achieved through the process of moving up the hierarchy of needs while sustaining the lower tiers of the model.

Although many software development teams rely on their QA/Test departments to uncover critical product defects near the end of development, we all recognize the inefficiency of this approach. It’s better to find and fix defects earlier in the software development process to save time and money in the long run! Colby Litnak explores key concepts that encourage and empower developers to take primary responsibility for producing quality software. As with a souped-up race car, developers need specially designed tools and practices when they are at the wheel: fail-fast frameworks, one-click test execution, automated defect prevention principles, automatic notifications of untested code, hurtful test failures, and much more. Discover the principles developers must embrace to produce high quality code the first time-before it goes to QA/Test.

Software defects bug everyone. If your organization is like most and you have a large queue of defects waiting to be fixed, this session is for you. It's probably not realistic to think we'll get around to fixing all of these bugs; so, we need to consider another approach. Lisa Crispin explains how agile teams address defects and how you can apply an agile approach to defects whether or not your development approach is "agile." Explore with Lisa ways to deal with a giant pile-or database-of old bug reports and which of the many, available defect tracking systems to consider-if you need one at all. See examples of alternatives to traditional bug reporting and how to shift your team's mindset toward preventing bugs in the first place. Get new ideas for taming your backlog of defects and discover ways your team can work together to minimize or eliminate bug reports all together.

Many organizations refer to their test teams and testers as QA departments and QA engineers. However, because errant systems can damage-even destroy-products and businesses, software quality must be the responsibility of the entire development team and every stakeholder. As the ones who find and report defects, and sometimes carry the “quality assurance” moniker, the test community has a unique opportunity to take up the cause of error prevention as a priority. Jeff Payne paints a picture of team and organization-wide quality assurance that is not the process-wonky, touchy, feely QA of the past that no one respects. Rather, it's tirelessly evaluating the software development artifacts beyond code; it’s measuring robustness, reliability, security, and other attributes that focus on product quality rather than process quality; it’s using risk management to drive business decisions around quality; and more.

Struggling to help your team or organization become more innovative? Have great ideas but can't seem to get them off the ground? We all try to influence others, whether we want to move our department to a better development method or suggest a Friday night movie for the family. We discover new ideas to take back to our workplace but then struggle to make something happen. How can we successfully influence change? From her latest book Fearless Change:

Selecting the appropriate testing techniques and test cases improves test efficiency, reduces time to market, and gives you confidence that the system is ready to ship. Using real-world case studies as examples, Madhav Phadke explains the fundamentals of robust test case selection and how code coverage can improve your test results. He discusses ways for testers to support debugging and faster repairs by isolating defects to a specific part of the software. Learn to select test outputs based on "total function evaluation" rather than end customer outputs and ways to use orthogonal arrays for testing combinations of parameters. Take away a list of free or inexpensive tools that can speed up your testing process.

You've heard of eXtreme Programming (XP) and perhaps Scrum. How about Crystal Clear, Adaptive Software Development, Dynamic Systems Development Method, Rational Unified Process for Agile Development, and Feature Driven Development? These are some of the many variations of Agile development methods. Join Jeff McKenna as he explores the many flavors of Agile development methods and explains the similarities and differences. Find out what aspects of Agile development can help your organization’s development team in its particular environment. If you are considering Agile development and need to decide in which direction to go, this session is for you. Although a one-hour session cannot provide all the information you will need, you can explore what is common-the philosophy, the values, the characteristics-and what is different-the methods, the coverage, the costs-about different Agile approaches.

Each year more and more open source development tools, including test tools, are available. By choosing to use open source test tools, companies expect to save money and take advantage of the community of shared development. Recently, there seems to be an abundance of open source testing tools being released, including tools for automated regression, load testing, test management, and defect tracking. But how do you know which tools are right for you? Based on his real-world experiences using such tools, Jeff Jewell covers the issues that you are likely to encounter as you evaluate open source testing tools. Learn where to find open source test tools, the challenges you
face in choosing these tools, and what you will need to do once you find the right tools. Find out if your organization is ready to use open source tools and how to find the right tools for you.

These days, we hear a lot about unit testing, testing for programmers, test-first programming, and the like. Design techniques for such tests and for improving system testing are often called white box test designs. Join Rex Black as he explains the basics of white box testing and compares
white box with other types of testing. Find out how the metaphor of "boxes" can inform-and confuse-us. Rex discusses the basis path tests, including cyclomatic number as a measure of complexity and a way to determine the number of tests necessary to cover all paths. He walks